Evenhanded

Not only will I rerun Comics Journal pieces, I will rerun old posts from my now defunct blog. Nobody read them in the first place, so we’re okay.

Let us go back together to the summer of 2004:

So the other night I was down in the basement with my friend Henri and he started getting on the Jews. This comes out rarely and only when he’s several stages past his usual state of drunkenness.

“My carrots are cooked,” Henri began, which is Quebecois for being so shitfaced there’s nothing to do but shut up and hope your bed is in the same building. That being the case, he started telling me about life and what it requires, especially as regards money.

First, he said, there’s the problem of being “money-shy.” That means not wanting to come right out and say you expect payment. Henri was like that at the start of his working life, around 11 or 12, but not for long. After all, it’s no way

to stay alive.

“You have to be like a Jew,” he told me. “Just grab the money and put it in your pocket and you don’t give change unless somebody says.” He reflected some more. “That’s what started the second war,” he said. As he saw it, the Jews took everything they could get in Germany and the Germans were “reduced to servitude,” a phrase he returned to like a Republican with a talking point.

“They bought up Germany and now they buy up the United States,” Henri said. “Oh, but they’re more discreet now. ” This introduced a spate of bird-calling and whistling to signal the Jews’ discretion. “Oh yes, they’re more discreet now,” he resumed. “Not like in Germany, when people were reduced to servitude.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told him.

“Oh, this is history. You have to know history.”

“Yeah, I know history and you’re full of shit. You are completely ignorant.”

“This is what happened. This –“

“You don’t know anything.”

“I don’t hate you,” Henri said, since I’m half-Jewish. “I don’t hate any Jew.” Then he got statesmanlike. “The Holocaust,” he said. “What was done to humanity, the crimes against humanity, on both sides –“

“No! Not on both sides.”

“On both sides. What was done . . . terrible.”

By this time I was popping my DVD out of the player and heading for the door. “Yes,” Henri called, a bit vindictively. “Yes, the truth hurts,”